#I'm sure this is a subject of discourse somewhere but I am not touching that <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[v-iv-rusty]

if Ive learned anything by browsing bloodborne fanfic it's that I really don't like romantic pairings between the doll and the hunter

[the-cybersmith]

You're totally right that scientific truths are are subject to change. We very well could eventually find a better theory of gravity than General Relativity, and indeed this is an active research area currently. But people who reject GR for antisemitic reasons also exist. You can't trust that everyone has good motives, and indeed you have to sometimes conclude that someone actually does have bad motives. It's important to be able to recognize when people have bad motives, our epistemic humility should not go so far as to make this impossible. Also, we will never eventually find out that flat earth has been correct all along. That's just not how science actually works. You can't 100% verify a theory, but you CAN 100% falsify a theory. The social phenomenon of the existence of flat-earthers can in fact be studied without concerning oneself with the possibility that these people are just pursuing their scientific curiosity. Race realism as a theory is somewhere in between "doubting GR" and "believing in flat earth", but it is closer to the latter than to the former. Sure, the principle of treating all people well does not depend on race realism being wrong, but people who cling to race realism are nonetheles a social phenomenon which requires an explanation, and "they're racist" is a pretty convincing explanation, and as I see it, a better one than your explanation of "they're scientifically curious". Your explanation just does not sufficiently explain the conduct of race realists, while the racism explanation does. Maybe racism is not the whole picture, but most people are pretty confident that it is a big part of the picture. As I said, don't let your commendable epistemic humility make you incapable of recognizing bigotry.

Thank you for the thoughtful ask, Anonymous!

I'm not quite so sure about this:

"you CAN 100% falsify a theory"

My understanding was that positives are easier to prove than negatives? Hence the common saying, "one cannot prove a negative"? I would have to refresh some logical theory I haven't touched since University though, and I'm prepared to be wrong about that.

As to the broader point... yes, bad faith does exist, but concluding any specific instance of it is necessarily a last resort. We should exhaust every possible alternative before assuming bad faith, because an assumption of bad faith makes further discourse difficult or impossible.

The other issue I have is conflating ANY AND ALL STUDY OF INTELLECTUAL HEREDITARIANISM with "Race Realism". I think this was one of the points Scott Alexander was trying to make in his email (though he used the term "reactionary", which I think is a bit unfair to reactionaries, I am a reactionary myself) about why he looked at the things those people wrote: Eseentially, he read their work because they were the only ones writing about it. Why were they the only ones writing about it? Because anyone looking into it was considered to be a race realist, so only people who actually were race realists were willing to do so!

There are practical implications to studying population intelligence and hereditarianism. Essentially, if we want to track how population IQ increases over time (and we should! it helps us know what nutrition is best for children, the importance of lead paint and similar things) we need to be able to eliminate confounding factors. Knowing how much we should reasonably expect a population to inherit intelligence from its own previous generation is important there!

Ceding that entire line of research to racists (which is what will happen if bad faith is assumed) seems counterproductive!

To mangle a common phrase about outlaws: "When studying the heritability of IQ is racist, only racists will study the heritability of IQ!".